Resetting Television

The Financial Times calls itself “one of the world’s largest business news organisations.” The global financial trade source recently lead a report about television executives’ views on the state of broadcasting with the following sentence. “Broadcasters have marked 2009, their worst year in recent memory, by seeking a term other than ‘television’ to describe the business of captivating couch potatoes.”

The new term for what the world’s television broadcasters produce is “video” according to FT.com. The article cited Chase Carey, chief operating officer at News Corp’s Fox TV. “…stations could act more like cable networks and demand fees from distributors to retransmit local TV signals and for prime sports programming.” The publications second authority on the global state of television broadcasting is Europe’s Gerhard Zeiler, RTL’s chief executive. He’s quoted saying “in the future, advertising will not pay all the bills.”

Zeiler’s words continued to point out “every free-to-air group will have to think about, for example, pay-TV, about online services, about video-on-demand.” Where’s the revenue coming from in the future?

Nielsen claims to be the world’s leading marketing and media information company and their most recent “Three Screens Report” maintains television viewing in the United States is at an all time high – some 141 hours per month. Further Nielsen’s document suggests digital or online viewing has taken little of the audience. The numbers of people watching videos on the Internet and mobile devices grew 70 and 46-per cent respectively according to MediaDailyNews which reports significant online and mobile growth actually had little affect on traditional television set viewing in the US.

"Although we have seen the computer and mobile phone screens taking on a significant role, their emergence has not been at the cost of TV viewership," said Jim O’Hara, president, media product leadership of The Nielsen Company, in the MediaDailyNews post citing a Nielsen news release.

The Financial Times however concludes online video viewing is how television decision makers will reset income opportunities in the future.